The world is afflicted by massive poverty. Almost half the world’s population earns less than $2.50 a day. Up to 30,000 children die every day of poverty-related causes. More than 1 billion have no access to clean water. A quarter of the world’s people live without electricity.
In the struggle to survive, a young single mother is forced to sell her body to find food. An educated elderly man drives a taxi to make ends meet – his pension spent on making sure his children get through school. A child grows up playing in the open sewer of an overcrowded slum.
However, well-intentioned aid projects too often fail when they conceive of the poor as helpless victims rather the potential agents of transformation for a better society. Working in the developing world, I have seen too many foreigners assume they know what is best for the poor. They waste thousands of dollars on inappropriate, badly designed or even insulting projects.
Part of the problem lies blaming the poor for their poverty or assuming that it simply due to a lack of money or skills. Rather, the roots of poverty lie in poor people’s lack of power over and participation in the institutions and systems – economic, political, social and cultural – that determine the course of their lives.
The poor are often locked in economic relationships of exploitation, inequity and usury. They are marginalized from processes of political decision-making, disenfranchised and even violently repressed. They face social ostracism – blocked from the networks of the powerful, prevented from entering the exclusive restaurants, bars and clubs of the rich and laughed at for their supposed lack of taste, style and fashion.
Therefore, poverty cannot simply be overcome by material assistance, education, technocratic reform or even economic growth. All of these things are important, perhaps even necessary. But they cannot be at the core of the struggle against poverty. Rather the engine of the process must be the collective empowerment of the poor, enabling them to claim a stake in the systems that affect their lives.
This can be done through community organizing – helping poor communities to organize institutions that advocate for their interests, building their capacity to manage conflict, assisting in consciousness raising activities and developing community betterment projects.
Outreach International, a charitable organization based in Independence, does similar work in several developing countries around the world. Rather than sending expensive expatriate aid workers, it hires local people who are familiar with the context. These field workers help poor communities organize their own self-help projects to solve local problems and grassroots organizations to advocate for their interests.
Rather than simply handing out resources or jumping straight into projects, they start by getting to know the people, listening to their problems and helping them develop solutions that are culturally sensitive, socially appropriate and well-suited to the local situation.
If you support development projects either in the U.S. or overseas, consider ways to listen carefully to what the local people actually need and how to empower them to have a voice in the systems and institutions that affect their lives.
Kampala, Uganda —
